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The woman’s face was hidden behind a black veil but her voice was full of defiance and pride for the caliphate that she had left just hours before.

“You're the first infidel I've seen in four years,” Umm Hamza said as The Telegraph approached.

She gestured back towards Baghuz, the village in eastern Syria that is now the last fragment of Islamic State territory. “The brothers are lions. They will fight on,” she said. “The Islamic State remains. We are weak now but we will come back again.”

The 21-year-old was one of hundreds of bedraggled women who emerged from Baghuz in recent days. They waited in a huddled mass in a clearing to surrender to the Kurdish fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Mothers clutched dirty blankets and tugged suitcases through the mud while trying not to lose track of their exhausted children. A woman lifted her black abaya to defecate in a field. There was shouting as families shoved past each other to get to the trucks that would take them north to the refugee camps.

These are among the final citizens of the Islamic State, the last people to have lived in the jihadists’ failed experiment in empire. The SDF now estimates that around 5,000 civilians and 1,500 fighters remain in Baghuz, more than originally thought but still a fraction of the 8 million people who once lived under the jihadists' black banner.

The SDF have been shocked at the numbers of civilians coming out of the village of BaghuzCredit:
Sam Tarling

Even in their hour of humiliation and defeat, many of the women still burned with the fanaticism that powered the Islamic State for the last five years. They offered no remorse for the caliphate’s crimes and vowed that it would it one day return.

That was the promise of Umm Mohammed, a 37-year-old from the nearby town of al-Bukamal. Like most Isil women she identified herself by her Arabic nickname, meaning Mother of Mohammed.

Whatever her oldest son’s real name was, he is dead now. He was killed defending al-Bukamal, she said, while a second son was cut down in the town of Sousa. Her five remaining children were huddled around her feet, their eyes wide with fear and faces caked with dirt.

Was it worth losing two sons in battle and subjecting her other children to horrors of war?

“We stayed in the Islamic State because we want heaven. And we buy heaven with our souls and our children’s souls,” she said. “God didn’t create us for this life, he created us for the next life.”

In between dense paragraphs of religious dogma and venomous condemnations of Shia Muslims, Umm Mohammed offered glimpses of the situation inside Baghuz.

She and her family had been living in a tent made of rags for two weeks. “Our tents were like palaces because they were in the Islamic State,” she said.

She said there were shortages of food but also that poorer families were unable to pay the high prices that come with a siege economy. Isil fighters had distributed some food but it was not enough. Without phones or internet access, they had little sense of the scale of Isil’s collapse. They knew only that Western warplanes were overhead all night and all day.

As she spoke, a female Kurdish fighter searched through the folds of an Isil woman’s abaya. The jihadist’s wife stood patiently as the young woman in the colourful scarf checked her.

As far as the Kurds knew, any one of these women could be a suicide bomber. Isil has no qualms about using women or children in attacks and none of these people had been searched for explosive vests before they reached the SDF’s lines.

The frantic hours it took to load the Isil families on to the trucks passed without incident under the watchful eye of Kurdish fighters. A column of American special forces drove past and bearded commandos peered through the windows at people from Baghuz.

There were moments when the women’s certainty seemed to crack. One mother said that the Isil fighters had promised them that the UN would be waiting to receive them once they came out of Baghuz. Instead they found only their Kurdish conquerors and waiting journalists.

But she insisted that Isil had not misled her. “There is no betrayal in the Islamic State.”

The large numbers of civilians in the remaining Isil pocket have complicated the SDF offensiveCredit:
Sam Tarling

The woman said that Isil had ordered them to go as part of a deal struck between the jihadists and the SDF. Their understanding of the terms were murky but some suggested that the SDF agreed to let them out in return for Isil releasing Kurdish prisoners.

The SDF strongly denied that there was a deal but said that they welcomed civilians coming out of Baghuz. “We are fighting a terror group. Either they surrender or they have to fight and die,” said Adnan Afrin, an SDF commander.

The women said that was exactly the intention of the remaining Isil fighters, who were heavily armed and prepared to launch suicide bombers to defend Baghuz. “The brothers have everything and they are ready always. Even the women are carrying guns and are ready to be suicide bombers,” said one.

SDF commanders have been shocked at how many women and children have emerged from the tiny pocket of Isil-territory. They had originally expected there were only around 1,500 civilians inside but so far more than 5,000 have come out.

The large numbers of civilians have made it difficult for the SDF to call in airstrikes and will likely confound the predictions of a quick victory made by Donald Trump and others. Cmdr Afrin said it was impossible to predict how much long the operation would take.

While most of the women continued to proclaim their loyalty to Isil, a few began a familiar routine of claiming that they had nothing to do with the jihadists.

Umm Mohammed had some advice about women who said that. “Everyone here is from the Islamic State. Every one of us,” she said. “Anyone who says they are not is a liar.”